ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock X79 Champion: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock X79 Champion: Layout and Features4. ASRock X79 Champion: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: PCMark 79. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven10. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201211. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.512. Synthetic: Super Pi13. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark14. Real World: Media Encoding15. Synthetic: MKV Playback16. Synthetic: Blu-Ray Playback17. Gaming: Battlefield 318. Gaming: Max Payne 319. Technical: Power Consumption20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

ASRock have used their comprehensive UEFI interface for this motherboard which has been decorated in an attractive red and black Fatal1ty style.

After pressing the DEL button to enter the BIOS we are greeted by the main screen which displays some basic information about the system.

Most of the important settings for us are located on the OC Tweaker page.  There are plenty of settings which will let you spend hours tweaking every ounce of performance from your system.  We also find ASRock’s extremely useful automatic overclocking feature on this page.

On the next page we find all of the non-overclocking settings under various different tabs.

The H/W Monitor page there is a list of temperatures readouts, fan speeds and voltages from the system.

The next two pages contain the boot and security settings and the last lets us exit the BIOS.

Overclocking

We decided to try out the ASRock automatic overclocking feature which let us overclock the system to a number of pre-defined frequencies.  We decided to use the 4.8 GHz setting for our tests which uses a baseclock of 100 MHz and a multiplier of 48x.  This required a core voltage of 1.46V.  We wouldn't feel comfortable pushing the motherboard further than this with prolonged use because the temperatures were getting a little toasty.

For some reason, we couldn't get this speed to validate properly on CPU-Z as every time we validated it seemed to over write the previous validation.  So we have a screenshot of the validation but not a link.

The maximum overclock we were able to achieve was 5.1 GHz using a baseclock of 100 MHz and a multiplier of 51x.  This required a core voltage of 1.48V.

See validation here.

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